FOLIO
Darkness beckons on the southwest corner of Beach Boulevard and San Pablo, within the sanctity of the former Wal-Mart that houses the Church of Eleven22. Billing itself as “a movement for all people to discover and deepen a relationship with Jesus Christ,” the fast growing, non-denominational church has a reputation for being progressive, tolerant, and trendy.
Concert hall quality lighting, short services that are heavy on the rock ‘n’ roll, and seemingly positive messaging sans collection plates serve to further the church’s hip reputation. So too does its lead pastor, Joseph “Joby” Martin III, a plain-talking, charismatic 42-year-old father of two who oozes Southeast Americana from the flannel shirts he wears onstage to the comforting, homespun twang that colors his speech.
Eleven22’s presentation plays well with the younger crowd. At least half the congregation at a recent service were Millennials or GenXers; social media is saturated with glowing testaments about how much congregants love their church.
And being on trend looks to be good business. In 2014, Outreach Magazine reported that the Church of Eleven22 was the 57th fastest-growing church in the nation. And just three years after the church spent $2.56 million renovating its Beach Boulevard location, it is expanding: Last summer it purchased the former Sneakers Sports Grille on Point Meadows Drive for $2.48 million.
But a slickly produced video the church released in March seems to dispel the notion that Eleven22 is all that progressive. (The video may have even prompted Facebook group The Jacksonville Minority Report to give the church the “Jerry Falwell Prize for Excellence in Hate.”)
The video, titled “Exodus Part 2 Week 5 Chauntel’s Story HD,” begins with the soft sounds of stringed instruments and stark white letters on a black background, “We celebrate baptism as a FAMILY. Every FAMILY has a STORY. Telling the STORY never gets old…” then fades to a woman identified as Chauntel Ceasar. Blues eyes peering out of an attractive, luminously youthful face beneath a Miley Cyrus haircut, Ceasar explains in a Northern brogue that she and her girlfriend started going to the church a year earlier.
“Nobody looked at us weird. Pastor Joby was really nice. I just came here to check it out, I guess. Everybody’s searching for something,” she says in the video.
Ceasar describes how eventually the couple met privately with Martin, expecting that he would be as supportive and welcoming as they’d come to expect over several months of services.
That, she says in the video, “is not how it went at all.”
“Joby was like, ‘So, here’s the deal: we love you and we’re glad that you’re coming to church. But, uh, yeah, you can’t be gay. You can’t be homosexual anymore. It’s not what God wants from you. It’s not lordship.’” Ceasar tells the camera. “That’s not what I wanted. And I, you know, what I wanted was to be with my girlfriend. It was like a barrier, it was like I could only get so close to Jesus on the inside.”
In the video Ceasar relates how she complied with God’s command – as communicated by Martin – by breaking up with her girlfriend, whom she had been living with and planning to eventually wed. Her girlfriend moved away.
Her choices, Ceasar says bitterly in the video, did not go over well with their mutual friends.
“I’m here with the aftermath and the people that, you know, were really close to us. And they’re judging me, they’re like angry at me ‘cause of the decision that I made and I try to explain to them. I stand witness every chance I get… [They’re like], ‘God is going to love you anyway. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice anything.’ I’m like, ‘You couldn’t be any more wrong.’”
One of Ceasar’s former coworkers, who asked not to be named, was shocked to learn of Ceasar’s change of heart. “I know she always struggled with being gay and that she felt it was against her religious beliefs and what-not. But I didn’t think she’d do something like that… I would’ve never thought she would’ve done that. I mean, I thought, she was obsessed with her ex. They seemed really happy together,” she wrote via Facebook Messenger.
Ceasar, who this past January posted on Facebook that she had moved to Africa to become a missionary with Jacksonville-based nonprofit Okoa Refuge Inc., did not respond to Folio Weekly’s request for comment.
On March 2, Ceasar publicly posted the video to her Facebook page with the following caption: “Hey Facebook. This is my testimony video that Church of 1122 recorded right before I got baptized. I would strongly encourage you to watch it and share it publicly. Let’s get viral Jack!
The video, which the church also posted, racked up over 80,000 views before being removed from the church’s page in recent months. (As of this writing, it is still available on YouTube.)
Laura Stift started going to Eleven22 when it was just a service at Beaches United Methodist Church, which has since changed its name to Beach Church Jax and adopted some of the same practices that have made Eleven22 so successful. Stift vividly recalls the day they showed Ceasar’s video in church last winter. “I was shocked. I was sick. I was upset. I was like, ‘I can’t believe this just happened.’ That was the last time I went to Eleven22. But it didn’t seem to faze anybody at the service.”
Corresponding via text message, Kaitlin Kelmanson, Ceasar’s former girlfriend, says Ceasar was already unhappy in the relationship when they spoke with Martin.
“I began to see the war inside of her from what she felt was right and wrong. I have never seen [Ceasar] more at peace in our relationship then [sic] she is now. Whether [Martin] was right or wrong in what he said. He was right for her.”
Stift believes that at least some congregants, which she says includes many homosexuals, have a false impression of the church’s ideology when, in reality, it’s just old-fashioned Biblical brimstone with a fashionable image.
“I feel like they want to attract young, a certain type of person, and they do, but he slips these old ideas in, ‘cause when you hear him preach, it’s very fast, very funny, very charismatic, but he’s also really strong in his beliefs,” she says, “…it’s very trendy but I don’t think people understand what they’re going along with, Joby’s beliefs.”
Like Stift, those who have been put off by Eleven22’s dogma may feel that Martin, who is ordained by the Southern Baptist Church, is a natural showman who brandishes a hip image which, either by design or by happenstance, effectively misleads people into following along
with antiquated views regarding homosexuality, women’s rights and their roles within relationships.
In 2014, Martin gave a speech called “Growing Godly Elders” at the Dallas conference of Acts 29 Network, “a diverse, global network of church-planting churches.” A recording of the speech is available on Acts 29’s website.
Some of the implications of this speech might come as surprising to his young, progressive-minded congregants.
After acknowledging that he is “not Methodist in theology or ecclesiology,” Martin gives a detailed explanation about why he believes church elders should be “legit old guys.” (In addition to Martin, there are four members of the church elder board, all white men well over the age of 50 who formerly belonged to Beach United Methodist Church.) He doesn’t explicitly say that women can’t be elders but the implication is plain.
In this speech Martin also says that he has given the elder board dominion over “guard[ing] the health and wholeness of me and my home.” As an example of how “we know we’re getting it right,” Martin says that six months before they launched the church, his elder board told him that it was time for his wife to quit her part-time job as a physical therapist.
“Our elders came to me and said, ‘We think it would be best for your home to have her at home to get you ready to tackle this beast.’ And so I said, ‘Yes sir, no problem, we can make that happen…we’ve got to change some things so give me a little while.’”
The elders, he says, said that wasn’t going to work and handed him a check on the spot for the amount his wife would have made working for six months.
Modern society doesn’t generally expect women to be subservient to their husbands, and certainly not to members of the board at their husband’s place of employment. But the notion of women as submissive to men seems to be part of Eleven22’s ideology.
“So two weeks later my wife was home and it was brilliant, brilliant,” Martin says.
After Martin denied requests for in-person or telephonic interviews on the grounds that he was traveling during the week, Folio Weekly asked whether women or homosexuals are allowed to become elders, via email correspondence with a church spokesperson. The church has yet to respond.
Recalling a service she attended last year, Stift says, “It was about the woman listening to the man, the man is the head of the household, the man is in control.”
In Martin’s speech he also says that these four men approve his travel schedule, his vacations, what constitutes a vacation, and that one elder is assigned to talk — though oversee seems a more fitting term — to him about his finances, marriage, home life, etc.
“We bought a new house last year and our elder board picked our house… our elder board said, ‘We think the lead pastor of our church should live in this kind of house,’” Martin says in the speech. Duval County Property Appraiser records show that in 2013, the Martins purchased a home in the gated community of Highland Glen for $450,000.
Local spiritual leaders, Reverend Linda Girouex of Riverside United Church of Christ and Pastor Deweyne Robinson of Called Out Believers in Christ Fellowship, believe that a Christian lifestyle is not mutually exclusive of a homosexual one.
Both hold similar beliefs that the bigger picture, i.e., the grace of God, the love of one another, the kindness and understanding and communication, as preached by Jesus in the New Testament, are the essence of Christianity. Further, both believe that the oft-cited quote from scripture, John 3:16 from the New Testament, pre-empts the hellfire and brimstone of the Old Testament, which includes such horrific passages as Leviticus 20:13, “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
Both also separately recalled unsuccessful efforts to suppress their same-sex preferences.
For Robinson, suppressing his sexuality led to a failed heterosexual marriage and subsequent promiscuity and decadence that ended with him being publicly shamed for being gay during the service of the church where he then worked while his now-husband, whom he’d just met and invited to that day’s service, looked on in horror. “The pastor decided to preach the most homophobic sermon I had ever heard in my entire life,” he says. “…that was a horrible, low point but it was also a day of reckoning.”
For Girouex, suppressing herself led to destructive relationships, a failed heterosexual marriage and an alcohol problem. “I did everything when I grew up to try to be normal. I tried to be married. It didn’t work,” she says.
Within a week of being with her current partner of 35 years, who is a woman, her issue with alcohol disappeared. “I was anesthetizing who I was, there was a whole part of myself I couldn’t access… I became a whole different person to be in this [prior] marriage,” she says.
Today, both Girouex and Robinson lead congregations at churches that are not only accepting of homosexuals, but also affirming, which means homosexuals can wed, preach and hold full leadership positions in the church, such as by being elders. Neither gives women subservient, second-class status.
Theirs are just two of the Christian churches whose doors are open and affirming to vulnerable and confused individuals who may have been convinced by a charismatic leader, rock music, dim lights and jubilation on social media that they must sacrifice their sexuality or equality in order to be right with God. How long can a person suppress that which is fundamental to the sense of self before it bubbles to the surface?
As Ceasar says in the video, “At the end of the day, your feelings are probably not going to change. Mine haven’t changed. I still love women. It’s a lordship thing where you make a decision. On a daily basis.”
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